Michael Bloomberg burst into the Yellow Room at Gracie Mansion Friday, where 40 reporters waited for him under the crystal chandelier.

"Just relax," he motioned to us with one arm, as he moved from table to table, each one piled with fresh fruit and pastries, shaking hands and greeting each one of us by the name on our nametag.

At the first of the monthly meetings the mayor plans to hold with journalists who are outside the City Hall press corps, Bloomberg announced the beginning of an open-door policy at City Hall.

"I don't want you to ever say that the Bloomberg administration withheld something or didn't give you the answer," he told us.

"That's the tone I want in this administration, and we believe that will give the people of New York what they want."

The group was made up of black journalists. Bloomberg said he'll also meet with Hispanic journalists, members of the regional press, and those who work for small new outlets outside the TV networks and the big papers.

A man of considerable charm, Bloomberg is offering New Yorkers a mixture of pragmatism and plainspokenness, along with a cordiality toward the press that we haven't seen in a long time. I could get used to this.

After eight years of being treated like the enemy, we listened to Bloomberg's spiel with the stunned glee of people who'd just been let out of detention. I've been through a few mayors, and when Rudolph Giuliani came in, it was like an iron curtain dropped over City Hall.

You called the mayor's press office for information. Someone took your request and told you someone would get back to you. Then you waited an hour. Two. Three. The whole day. Nobody called you back, ever.

It was Giuliani's way of trying to control the press. Treat them with contempt. Ignore them. And reporters hate to be ignored. Before Giuliani, the police department's public-information unit was the laziest press office in city government. The cops who ran it acted as if bending over to get a file and looking up a name and a few statistics was a terrible imposition. But you occasionally got a shred of information. Under Giuliani, you could forget it. They took your request, and the eternal silence began.

"I used to get more information from the police in Haiti than I got from the NYPD under Giuliani," a fellow Newsday reporter confided last week. Officials at places like the City Planning Commission were nice, but afraid, he said. "I just gave up."

So did a lot of other reporters. It took me about two weeks. It was pointless to call the mayor's press office. So I called the press people at the Board of Education or Human Resources, as I'd done for years. But their responses got slower, and sometimes I never heard back from them, either.

Giuliani gagged his commissioners, and anything they said had to be filtered through the mayor's office. I don't think I talked to one of them in the last eight years.

Giuliani disliked and mistrusted the press in a visceral way. It's true that we aren't always endearing. But the more accessible public officials are, the better they treat us, the better coverage they get. Several news organizations, including Newsday, threatened a lawsuit to get access to routine police information, forcing the cops to obey their own rule book.

"It was pitiful," said Thulani Davis, a longtime writer for The Village Voice who last year became its city editor. She's delighted by Bloomberg's change of policy.

Bloomberg says he's ordered his commissioners to talk to the press, and Davis said she's asked her staff to call them "and see what happens."

Wayne Gillman, news director at Inner City Broadcasting, said blacks and Hispanics were kept at arms' length by the previous mayor, but that he'd noticed a warmer reception from City Hall in recent weeks. On Friday, Bloomberg answered questions on subjects ranging from the flak over a proposed firefighters memorial (he would have chosen a different design) to how he plans to reform the schools (he wants total control).

With the city facing so many problems, we're going to need answers to lots of questions. We'll see how Bloomberg responds when things get ugly. For now, though, the curtains seem to have parted.